Real
by kaiserklee
Summary: It's terrible to think it, but Hinata is glad that with Nanami, at least, there's a greater chance of bringing her back. There has to be a way to extract her data, or maybe there's even a backup. It's all he wants to have her back. (Except Hinata's only forgotten, Nanami was a real person and she's dead.)


Unlike the others, Hinata wakes up without memories of his time as Ultimate Despair.

It's odd considering what he had been told, that he would wake up with _only_ memories of his time as Ultimate Despair, but he's not about to question his good luck—though the thought that one of the talents this body possesses is the same as Komaeda is, frankly, unsettling. It's fortunate, though. Everyone else had woken up with dual-memories of Ultimate Despair and the simulation, and though their real personalities won out most the time, there have been relapses.

Kuzuryuu had woken up with mad laughter bubbling on his lips, baby-blue right eye pulsing in its socket even as it stared straight ahead, completely at odds with the spastic movements of his left. Hinata had needed to tackle him to the ground before he would calm down, and the others finally snapped out of the mild trance they had fallen into at the familiar sight of despair in one of their own.

By the next day, Kuzuryuu had clawed out Enoshima Junko's eye.

"You must be more careful!" Sonia had exclaimed, applying disinfectant while Kuzuryuu grinned through the pain and Souda looked sick, hiding in the back of the room. Later during the day, Kuzuryuu confesses to Hinata that it had been extremely satisfying.

Naegi has been helpful too, helping them acclimatize to their new lives, raising morale with his unending optimism.

"It's not impossible that the others might wake up," Naegi said once, speaking over Togami's blunt statement of the opposite. "We just need to have hope."

It almost reminds Hinata of Komaeda, but Naegi's hope is much more grounded, much more sensible. It reminds him of Nanami instead, and any inferiority he might have felt towards the _real_ Ultimate Hope – whose hope had been genuine, had been won through trial, where his own had been nothing but a patchwork of stolen talents gained through a lobotomy in an underground laboratory – vanishes.

Today, like every other day, they take shifts watching over their comatose friends. In case they wake up, someone needs to be there. For all they know, someone might wake up entirely as Ultimate Despair, and Hinata doesn't even want to think what might happen when the capsule automatically opens and releases them into a room full of defenseless victims.

"None of us fuckin' got along," Kuzuryuu said, when Naegi first proposed taking shifts. "Hell, I wanted to run through the room pulling plugs when I first woke up. Except for Peko."

It's terrifying to Hinata that his last sentence had sounded more like something he said as an afterthought to comfort himself than an actual statement of truth. Maybe that's part of the reason why he takes this job so seriously, certainly more seriously than Souda, who is prone to tinkering with things while waiting, and Owari, who can hardly sit still. Deep down, Hinata knows that this is easier for him, and he doesn't blame their short attention span. He doesn't remember being Ultimate Despair, but the others do, and they're afraid of having someone wake up and remind them all over again.

Hinata circles the room, looking into each capsule and trying to reconcile the aged, eroded faces inside with those of the friends he had made during the simulation. All of them look terrible. Not that Hinata and the others had been any better when they first woke up, but they're starting to recover; Owari has regained some weight and Sonia doesn't look quite as drawn, Souda has reworked the _thing_ that had been his right arm into a prosthetic that actually resembles a human hand. Hinata has had a haircut, though they've yet to find any dye to turn it brown again.

He finishes his round of the room, and like every other time, there's a dull pang in his chest.

"Hinata-kun," Naegi says, and Hinata turns to see him sheepishly poke his head through a crack in the door before entering fully.

"Naegi."

"I just wanted to see how you were holding up," Naegi says. "And I thought maybe you would want some company, but, ahh, I don't mean to intrude if you'd rather be alone."

"No, that'd be fine."

Hinata thinks that he'd be grateful for company, but even now, there's a limit to how far he'll stretch his pride.

Naegi sits down next to him, and for several minutes, they just sit and watch the non-responsive capsules. It's not an awkward silence. There's just nothing to say, so they say nothing; Naegi's good at gauging when there needs to be conversation and when there needs to be silence. Hinata can appreciate that, because Souda never knows when to shut up and Sonia sometimes treats him like he's about to break. Speaking of which…

"I've noticed that sometimes the others talk amongst themselves," Hinata says, thinking of a time that Sonia had been whispering to everyone and then clamming up the instant he approached them.

"Does that bother you, Hinata-kun?"

"Well, no. At first I was worried they might have slipped into a relapse and was planning something horrible," Hinata says, chuckling. "But then I realized that if they were in despair they'd be much more likely to start killing one another than anything."

"Ahaha, that's morbid, but probably true." Naegi scratches the back of his neck. "They haven't had any relapses recently, so I'm hoping that won't happen much more, if at all. What about you, Hinata-kun?"

"Nothing. I still can't remember anything from before," Hinata says, and that's true, except for the one stray memory of talking to Komaeda on the boat. "Well, I said something was boring, one time, but that's it. I wonder if Kamukura had been mostly harmless because he couldn't be bothered."

Naegi winces, but Hinata already knows that wasn't true.

"Do _you_ remember anything?" Hinata asks. Naegi had told them all about the killing game he'd been forced into, the memories that had been stolen from him.

"…Bits and pieces," Naegi says, still smiling, but it's a small, vulnerable one.

"Looking at the others, I'm not sure I want to remember," Hinata admits.

"It can be painful." Naegi takes a deep breath. "There was…someone who cared for me, but unfortunately, she fell into despair and…I didn't even recognize her when I saw her again. She was pretending to be someone else, you see. I…wish I'd recognized her then. Maybe things would be different if I did. I don't believe she truly fell. I think she still cared about me."

"…I'm sorry."

It's a pretty sorry thing to say, but that's all Hinata manages.

Naegi falls silent, hands clenching at his knees.

More time passes, and Naegi excuses himself when Kirigiri comes in and pulls him away for some business that Hinata doesn't care to ask about. It's a pity that he leaves, though. Not long after his absence, Hinata remembers that he had wanted to ask about Nanami.

There's no capsule here for Nanami.

It makes sense. She had been an AI, not a real person, and that thought is both depressing and a relief. It's terrible to think it, but Hinata is glad that with Nanami, at least, there's a greater chance of bringing her back. There has to be a way to extract her data, or maybe there's even a backup. It brings a smile to his face that he might see her again soon, and he doesn't mind that she won't be flesh and blood. They can still talk about games, he can still see the determined gleam in her eyes, and she won't fall asleep on his shoulder like she used to but he'll be able to at her side. She'll still be here and he'll have her back.

That's all he wants.

* * *

Eventually, Hinata brings it up with the others.

"Do you think you could do something about it?" Hinata asks, and Souda remains uncharacteristically quiet. "I know you're not a programmer, but maybe you can fix the hardware."

"I…could look into that," Souda says. "Y-Yeah! I'll do that. No problem."

"Yes, it'd be splendid to see Nanami-san again," Sonia says, and she turns to Owari and Kuzuryuu until they say something similar, in such a stilted way that Hinata wonders if they think he's blind.

For God's sake, Hinata _just_ handed him a duty of great importance and Souda's not even pretending to do his usual thing of boasting to impress Sonia.

"Guys, just tell me what's wrong."

"Nothing!" Souda screeches.

"…Seriously?" Hinata sighs and turns to the others. "Is it impossible? Did the virus just wipe out every trace of Nanami? I can handle it. Just tell me."

"No, that's not it all," Sonia says. "Naegi-san is already working to salvage the data, so…"

Hinata nods. "All right."

It's not the whole story, but he can trust that Sonia won't outright lie.

His shift ended a while ago, so Hinata leaves to explore the islands. It's disconcerting to see the differences between the real Jabberwock Islands and what he knew from the simulation, but there's also enough similarities that it's a source of comfort. In the real world, despite being away from the mainland, away from the largest conflicts, Jabberwock is still damaged. People must have evacuated in a hurry, because there are traces of luggage and obvious remnants of old inhabitants. Hinata tries not to think about whether Naegi had needed to clean up bodies. Still, most the buildings are what he remembers, even if in various states of disrepair, and the cottages have been cleaned up for all of them to reclaim their old homes.

Hinata heads to the third island, where the hospital is larger and more practical than the one he remembers. He represses a shudder at the sight of Titty Typhoon. He's never managed to go inside. Tsumiki is one of the few to have her eyes wide open inside the capsule, and he's always been tempted to open it just to close her eyes, hide the madness that's eaten away at her sanity. Motel, cinema…

And there's the electronics street.

…Well, the clutter is the same.

Hinata smiles when he remembers Nanami sifting through the pile looking for games. She hadn't found any then, but maybe he can find some now. When she's back, he thinks, he might be able to hook it up and send it to her somehow. Or he could play it and tell her about how terrible he was in comparison to her talent. She'd like that. Not him saying how terrible he was, but being able to talk about games, too, rather than just play them herself. She'd always liked company, liked to share her talent.

Not like him, hoarding talents for himself.

Hinata sits down at the edge of the mound of electronics and begins to sort his way through them, occasionally sidling forward as the pile decreased in size. Lots of laptops, mostly defunct, but he wonders if he should bring them back for spare parts. An old Walkman, some cassette tapes, headphones. Walkie-talkies might be useful, so he pockets the two that he finds. Batteries, chargers. Hinata accidentally tangles his legs in wires and it takes him an embarrassingly long time to wrangle himself free, and after he does, he looks around to make sure there aren't witnesses.

If Togami had seen him, he would never live it down.

Finally, Hinata moves an outrageously old, hilariously massive PC out of the way and finds an old portable gaming console that had been trapped underneath. It looks undamaged, or at least, the screen isn't cracked and all the buttons are there, albeit dusty. Hinata grins, and he's relieved to have found it because the sun is starting to get too strong and his back hurts. He flips the console over and tries to turn it on, but as expected, it's unresponsive. No batteries, maybe, or something is messed up on the inside. He'll just take it back and have Souda take a look.

There's a game slotted inside though, and for whatever reason, seeing just a hint of the cartridge takes his breath away. He's not sure why, but his hands are shaking and the sweat that's building on his forehead isn't from the sun anymore. He feels cold and his mouth is dry, and there's a terrible, sinking feeling in his gut and he just wants to drop the console and forget he ever saw it.

Hinata pops the game cartridge out.

Gala Omega?

…Oh.

 _"It's such an old game! It's a classic, don't you think?_

 _…Oh._

Fuck.

Fuck, he needs to breathe, he's having a panic attack and holy shit, this is the worst feeling, worse than the time in the simulation when he was stuck having to choose between releasing clones of Junko into the real world or having his identity wiped away. He's confused. His life seems like a joke right now, a really, really bad joke, like he's a standup comedian with an audience that doesn't respond in laughs but screams— _because he's the one fucking killing them, he's killing them and it's_ _that their blood is all over him, how the fuck does he think something as disgusting as that is boring_

He's yanked back like a fish on a hook. It feels like he's pulled out his skin. Everything hurts. Now he feels the persistent throbbing of his heart, the heavy thud echoing in his ears. It's hard not to throw up.

Kamukura – _Hinata_ – Hinata wakes up to find himself on all fours, breathing harsh, ragged breaths that hurt his lungs. There are tears in his eyes and he doesn't bother wiping them. He's still clutching the game console in his hand and he just stares at it, forcing down his bile, until, slowly, he stops gasping for air and his breathing evens out into something barely rhythmic. He doesn't feel—all there. Not yet. He's not sure he'll ever feel normal again.

 _Oh, Nanami had been a real person._

 _…_

 _…_

She's dead.


End file.
